Why the ancient Greeks disliked letter writing

Reviewing Paola Ceccarelli's Ancient Greek Letter Writing, Josephine Crawley Quinn points out that letters
were once “the new technology, superseding the oral message” and as Ceccarelli demonstrates, they were regarded by many with “suspicion and disapproval.” In contrast to Near Eastern empires, which had “used letters from the third millennium BC, sending them across vast distances to report matters large and small to the Pharaoh or the Great King, and to carry their orders back” the Greeks treated the personal letter with suspicion and distaste, even

well into the Hellenistic period, when letter
writing had long become a part of everyday
life. They highlight the possibility of loss,
forgery and deception, and associate letters
with danger, cruelty, women, mercenaries,
merchants, tyrants and kings. According to
Euripides' tragedy, the sacrifice of Iphigenia
in Aulis by her father Agamemnon in the hope
of better weather for the Greek fleet was
brought about by the deceitful letter he was
persuaded to write to her mother telling her to
send the girl to be a bride for Achilles - and by
reports that the Assyrian queen Atossa, as
ivell as employing eunuchs and wearing
baggy trousers, insisted on administering ;
justice through letters rather than in person.
creating an appropriate relationship, and an
inappropriate distance, between herself and her
subjects,

Summarizing Cecarelli, Quinn explains that the Greeks distrusted letters because they
“are personal and private, reaffirming the individual relationship
between writer and recipient and quite alien
to the public and communal ideology of
Greek city states. . . . Greek cities, and especially the democratic ones, tended to communicate through public decrees rather than letters” (5).